


my crown is called content

by cartographies



Series: personally canonical post-s4 post-quentin's-resurrection universe [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Roleplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:49:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23716984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: Margo has even let Eliot borrow her crown.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Margo Hanson/Eliot Waugh
Series: personally canonical post-s4 post-quentin's-resurrection universe [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1864921
Comments: 37
Kudos: 104





	my crown is called content

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a sequel set in my own personally canonical post-season 4 world, set up in [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20236018/chapters/47958451). It's absolutely not necessary to read that one first, though. The basic premise is that Quentin and Eliot are grossly in love and Margo is their best friend that they sleep with. Spoiler alert: Quentin Coldwater is alive and in love and having great sex as he should be, and Quentin and Eliot and Margo are together forever, as they should be.

One evening Quentin is crossing the edge of the throne room in Whitespire when he hears Margo’s voice bark out, “Quentin!” It makes him freeze in place on instinct, but she’s walking towards him with a tired smile.

“Come have a drink with me,” Margo says when she reaches him, giving his arm a friendly squeeze that makes Quentin relax instantly. “I can’t stand another second of these chucklefucks.” 

Quentin smiles back at her. He’d been his workshop, which is what Eliot and Margo insist on calling the out-of-the-way room where he’d set up a long trestle table under a window and works on all the broken things people bring him, but darkness had come on fast and his eyes are tired and his fingers sore and he’d been heading back to his and Eliot’s room to rest and wait for Eliot to be done with whatever he's been up to today. Eliot had brought him a sandwich and a kiss before heading off to some evening engagement, but Quentin can’t remember the exact details. He’d been too absorbed in trying to fix a very old Fillorian pocket watch, a task made more challenging by the fact it kept bear-time, which as it turns out is pretty different than the normal sort. By unspoken agreement Quentin and Margo head in that direction, so Eliot might most easily find them. 

As they walk Quentin asks, “Have you heard from Fen? How’s the royal tour going?”

Margo makes a derisive noise, but there’s a fond smile ticking at the corner of her mouth. Grabbing a bottle of wine and some glasses from a sideboard, she replies: “Fantastic. Fen’s a hit. We’re lucky to have her to handle the public relations shit. She’ll hold anyone’s baby. And she’s having a great time doing it.” 

Quentin wishes he had that job, holding people’s babies. He guesses for Fen it comes along with a lot of charming the populace and listening to their concerns and making speeches, which he wouldn’t be so hot at, but he could follow behind, holding babies. Sadly it seems like his services aren’t needed. He almost tells Margo this, makes a joking offer. 

But Margo would know he’s not joking, because Quentin has somehow become Whitespire’s de facto babysitter. The Pickwick clan is constantly producing tiny Pickwicks, and their parents are busy helping run the country, so while Misty Pickwick heads a committee on merfolk, sirens, naiads, selkies, and other magical beings living in Fillorian bodies of water, Quentin has found himself watching Rue Pickwick, aged six, Juniper Pickwick, aged three, and Marfen Pickwick, aged eight months. _(“Marfen, is that—” Quentin had asked, “Yep,” Margo had replied. "Exactly what you think. Blatant sucking up, but Fen was very moved.”)_ Margo had come upon him in a hallway the other day, trying to prevent Rue from rendering poor Juniper bald while she braided her little sister’s hair, dandling Marfen in his lap, and she’d looked at him with great suspicion.

When they get to the room Margo makes herself at home and pours them both a glass from the purloined wine bottle, and Quentin sits on the edge of the bed with his while Margo roots through a pile of clothing heaped perilously on a chair (Quentin was going to get to that tonight before Eliot had a fit, he _swears_ ) until she fishes out a silky, gossamer-light robe that has somehow found its way into Quentin’s and Eliot’s clean laundry (well, it’s not _that_ much of a mystery) and then—oh, Margo’s undressing. There are her boobs. He’s very fond of them and by this point he’s certainly seen plenty of them but he still finds himself blushing and looking away while Margo laughs at him. It’s the context that throws him, the casualness. Quentin had thought he’d known Margo and Eliot were super weird but he hadn’t actually known shit. He remembers sitting in this same position with Eliot beside him chatting to Margo and she’d just whipped her top off, but then gotten distracted by something Eliot said and stood there hands on her hips, tits out, while they argued heatedly, the sexual energy from either of them in the negative as Quentin tried to will his boner away, it’s presence more from them arguing, what the _fuck_ , than any nudity. Seventh grade all over again except, uh, not. Since Margo has decided to consider Quentin a functional extension of Eliot, this is just his life now. 

Once Margo is safely tucked away (“Your virgin eyes are safe now, Q,”) and they’re just on the bed, chatting, it feels just like—

“It’s weird,” Quentin says. “But this reminds me of Brakebills.” Obviously, hanging out with Eliot or Margo usually involved hanging out with both of them, but he has plenty of memories of that first year that involve Margo alone, dragging Quentin to her room to winkle humiliating stories out of him or talk about nerd shit or to study together. 

“Mm,” Margo says, but looking around Eliot and Quentin’s room, with its ornate tapestries and stone walls, a bedchamber in the castle from which she rules her kingdom. 

“Well, there are some key differences,” Quentin admits. He doesn’t know how to express it—the exact feeling the warm flicker of firelight and the taste of wine under his tongue and the smell of Margo around him evokes. He wants to try, though. That’s one nice thing about having been dead—that even Margo tends to be a lot more tolerant of Quentin’s frequent uncontrollable urges to vomit up how much he loves her. “But I remember a lot of— this. You and me hanging out. I know it was just because of—”

“Eliot,” Margo finishes. 

“Yeah,” Quentin agrees, fond. “He’d, like, adopted me, and you followed suit.” He’d gotten enough of the narrative, at least as it now stands, to know this was the order of things. Eliot had this first year he thought was cute, and Margo had with only minimal grumbling allowed him into their shared universe.

“No,” Margo replies, with a little shake of her head and a crease between her brows. “I mean, yes. But that’s not what I meant.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, before she says, with a strange amount of emotion, “Eliot—let me. He allows me to…” 

She trails off as if daunted in the face of something massive and immovable. The idea of anyone, even Eliot, granting Margo _permission_ to do anything is of course absurd. But Quentin gets that isn’t what she means. He’s not sure exactly what she does mean, but he thinks he can get an idea—from his own intimate knowledge of the spaces Eliot creates for the people he loves to be their better and best selves. He smiles and Margo smiles back at him, shaking off whatever odd gravity had descended. It’s a particular smile, the membership card for he and Margo’s own exclusive club, the bounds of which are very precise: the one for the two people on many planets who know exactly just how wonderful Eliot Waugh is.

Margo, as Quentin had noted earlier, looks exhausted. She looks tired more often than not these days, not that Quentin would ever tell her that. He values his life slightly more than that, now. (This is the kind of joke he still only dares make internally.) Eliot and Quentin had once made the mistake of fretting over it within earshot of Fen who’d made fun of them for _sounding like mother lemurs_ —apparently the acknowledged overbearing parents of Fillory. 

As Margo rubs her forehead with a sigh, Quentin is confident enough in Margo’s affection for him to venture: “Hard day?”

“Yeah,” Margo says with a bitter laugh. “It’s fucking—it’s this long running court case that’s just intractable. During the Lorian Wars, this community of wombats was driven from their ancestral territory at the border, and humans who were driven from _their_ farmsteads because they were so devastated by the Beast draining the Wellspring—fucking Martin Chatwin’s wonderful regime that I’m going to be untangling until I _die—_ they moved onto that land awhile later, and the wombats, understandably, want it back and have basically since the moment it stopped being a warzone but only now that everything has settled down can they really fight it legally, but the humans, also understandably, aren’t keen to leave after five decades and won’t be swayed by any compensation or attempt at compromise, and that’s before you throw in the prejudice against talking animals which keeps showing up in how the humans keep saying it’s a waste of arable land to have an underground village there, because wombats live in _burrows_ , because Eliot actually taught everyone how to farm and apparently this land is really fertile although it doesn’t matter now because the Wellspring is back online but you can see why they’re hedging their bets and it doesn’t matter to the wombats, and it’s miserable and endless and incredibly frustrating and now they’re looking to us for answers and arbitration and I have no clue what the right fucking thing to do is.”

Quentin opens his mouth—to say what, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is either, and he’s really grateful that it's no longer his job to try to figure it out. Maybe just to agree that it sounds miserable and hard and sad. 

But Margo raises her hand to cut him off. “I don’t actually feel like talking about it. I have talked about it _all goddamn day_.” 

Quentin shrugs. “Cool.”

Margo laughs a little, bumps her shoulder against his. She still sounds tired and frustrated, but she slumps against Quentin and lets him put his arm around her. “I miss Fen,” Margo says with a mournful yearning in her tone that surprises Quentin in its raw earnestness. After a pause she says, “Wicker’s coming to visit soon, right? She’s actually pretty great at this shit.”

“Yeah, in the next couple of days according to her last bunny,” Quentin confirms. 

Margo and Julia’s burgeoning friendship is both very pleasing to Quentin and slightly terrifying. There’s a collegial component, Quentin gathers, from the regularity of their semi-monthly _cocktail meetings_. Julia, since Quentin’s resurrection, has managed to both amass an astounding amount of power and retain her humanity. A demigoddess, in short. This position has come with unexpected responsibilities: Julia has suzerainty over all the magical beings in three of the five boroughs and parts of New Jersey, and (via an adventure that had Margo stalking back to Whitespire with twigs in her hair and a feral, triumphant grin, declaring that this was absolutely the _last_ time she went on a field trip to visit fucking trees with Julia goddamn Wicker) the dryads of Fillory. So it turns out they have a lot of points of comparison, professionally speaking. 

A companionable silence descends for just a moment before the door is opening and Eliot’s voice saying, “Quentin, my dove, daddy’s home and he needs a bath,” precedes his physical form filling the doorway.

Oh, god. Margo’s head swivels on its neck in Quentin’s direction, like an owl’s. Her smile is shark-like. He can practically see her nose twitch as she catches the scent. He’s taking a coward’s comfort in animal metaphors. 

“My _dove_? That one’s new.” _Daddy,_ atleast in terms of self-referral, is certainly not. (When Eliot had revealed he’d not only never gotten Quentin to call him this, he’d never managed it with anyone else either, Margo had said, _oh I mean_ I’ve _never had any problem, it’s not my thing but it just seems to happen. Like, do you remember that hydromancer we met in Cadiz, she—_ that’s as far as Margo got before Eliot had gotten too mad for her to continue. Quentin’s embarrassment has _almost_ been overcome by his desire to grant Eliot all of his, but—not quite yet.) Also not new: lamb, honeybunch, pumpkin, muffin, dumpling, cherub, dearheart—and those were just the ones said in Margo’s hearing to make her squirm in horrified delight. 

“Hello, Bambi. Hi baby,” Eliot says with placid goodwill as he comes forward to give Quentin a kiss that’s slightly less wonderful than normal, although Quentin doesn’t figure out why until Eliot does the same to Margo—the image is sort of funny, them waiting in a row, faces tilted up—and Margo jerks back in disgust.

“Jesus’ tits, El, you smell—” 

“To quote your own poetic turn of phrase, like a horse fucked a bird, yes. Like I said, I must bathe,” he says as he elegantly swans off to the bathroom to do just that. Quentin can’t help the way his chest feels tender with love at Eliot’s ridiculousness, and he looks over to see a private, totally unique and unreproducible smile on Margo’s face, aimed at Eliot’s retreating back, and feels for the first time his own one-of-a-kind, true original, not for fucking sale _Eliot smile_ , although it’s been on his face since the moment he heard Eliot’s voice. They turn to each other, still smiling: twinned, alone. 

*

Fucking Eliot and Margo is _also_ just his life now, because Eliot has eagerly taken Margo on as a delightful collaborator in the endeavour of getting Quentin off. His, like, _stage assistant_ , in the complex production that is ‘fucking Quentin often and well.’ It adds a performative flair to the proceedings that Quentin has never gotten to see to this degree before—because Margo is the essential ingredient. He feels honored to see it, this fundamental piece of _Eliotness_ —and desperately, humiliatingly hot for it _all the time._

All of which is to say: the turn their evening has taken an hour later is no surprise. The earlier disrobing was no portent. It was just as likely they’d end the night gossiping or playing Push or watching something on the laptop that Eliot keeps well-stocked with downloads and perpetually charged by a spell of his own invention. But they’re doing none of that, because Quentin _wants_ it, and Eliot and Margo team up to help him figure out what _it_ is and then they give it to him, over and over. 

Quentin stands in the middle of the room, and Margo stands before him, hands on her hips. Eliot sits in a big armchair, the one by the window with the best natural light in the entire castle, the one Margo told him was the reason she’d chosen this tower for Quentin and Eliot’s official chambers: Quentin had the best reading spot in the whole damn kingdom. 

His hands clench and unclench at his sides. His breath comes in uneven pants. He can feel blood pooling in his groin, and his face is on fire. Quentin snatches a look at Eliot lounging in the chair, in full High King drag, all regal, bored elegance. Margo has even let Eliot borrow her crown. _Fuck_.

Margo hasn’t changed out of her robe. As she circles Quentin in a leonine prowl, it makes no real difference: she’s as confident in the regalia of her own skin as she is crowned. She eyes him up and down, fingers tapping against her hips, head cocked. 

“I still say you’re not _that_ cute,” Margo says on a bored sigh. “But the king disagrees. Nevertheless, standards have to be maintained. That’s where I come in.”

Quentin’s face gets hotter. _God_. His mouth is very dry. He keeps being overwhelmed by waves of embarrassment, of an excruciating awareness of how stupid this is, how silly. How had this even _escaped_ him, made it to the surface, caught fire in the presence of oxygen? 

They’d been warm and relaxed in those evening hours that were usually theirs to spend however they liked, after Eliot’s return from the Association of Pegasi Veterans of the Lorian Wars’ annual banquet he’d been put in charge of hosting. Quentin had been looking at Eliot, so impossibly lovely in the candlelight, thinking about how handsome he looked in vests and ties and how radiantly beautiful now in a robe, hair damp from his bath, and found himself blurting out that sometimes he kind of missed Eliot’s High King wardrobe. How he’d never gotten to enjoy it. (“ _Oh, honey. Me neither_.”) Then Quentin got lost in the maze of his longing, spinning in dizzying circles, hopelessly turned about, but with Eliot’s palm warm on his back and Margo’s eyes laughing at him over her wine glass, he’d righted himself long enough to abruptly stumble out of a quite different opening from the one he’d entered as he confessed how much he’d liked it, first year, Eliot and Margo’s affectionate condescension, their superiority, how desperately he’d longed to be worthy of their attention, how little he could believe he’d earned it through seemingly no conscious effort of his own. 

Margo’s face had lit up with understanding then, and she’d set down her glass and leant forward towards Quentin and Eliot and said, grin wicked, _ooooh, here’s what we’re gonna do—_

“I don’t understand,” Quentin says, now, about an hour later. He thinks this is appropriate to the...the role he’s playing. They’re role playing. Quentin wants the floor to open up and swallow him. He keeps fighting the temptation to say _guys, this is stupid, forget it._

But he doesn’t say that. 

“The king,” Margo says very slowly, as if Quentin is very stupid, “well, he’s extremely busy. If he stuck his dick in every pretty boy that caught his eye, nothing would ever get done. Because, between you and me, he’s not the most discerning. That’s a lot of boys. _Total_ slut. You might be nice on the eyes, but who knows if you’re a good lay? Like I said, there are standards. He needs something more than just a pretty face and an ass or a mouth. He deserves the _best_.”

Quentin blinks as his brain catches on a bunch of inconsistencies here. If Margo is King Eliot’s...lackey? Assistant? Puppeteer? Boy...tester?—it wasn’t exactly clear—then should she really be talking about him like that if he’s in the room? Why _is_ he in the room, if he’s so busy, and it’s too much of a waste of time to try Quentin out himself? Quentin feels kind of offended on behalf of Quentin the castle serving boy, maybe about to get promoted to bed-warmer. There’s an interview? He has to go through _middle management?_

He wants to argue with Margo about the flaws in her narrative here, but she would just say _baby, none of that fucking matters, it’s sex_ , and anyway mostly he just wants to touch his dick, which is getting harder, at the thought he has to meet Margo’s _very_ high standards, to prove himself worthy of being fucked by his king. He will. 

He’s going to fucking _ace_ this, thanks, because Eliot is so gorgeous and kingly and _big_ and—

Quentin’s eyes can’t help but jerking over to Eliot where he sprawls in the chair, but before he can really take him in or assess the expression on his face, Margo takes two quick steps towards him and snaps her fingers in front of his eyes. 

“None of that now,” she says sharply. “I’m talking to you. I’m the one you gotta impress.” 

He obeys Margo’s command and wrenches his eyes away from Eliot, but she puts her hand gently on Quentin’s jaw and tilts his head more fully towards her.

Quentin can see the ghost of a smile on her mouth as she asks in a different, gentler voice: “Good?”

“Yeah,” Quentin replies, and he feels a fresh rush of embarrassment at his breathy, eager tone. 

Because it’s _so_ good already, and that’s why he feels like he has to put up a token resistance in inward pedantry. It’s so easy for him to fall into fantasy and for most of his life this has been a source for shame and grounds for mockery. The last time he could just _play_ like this was, he guesses, approximately the seventh grade. He thinks that was the last year Julia was willing to play make believe with Quentin, although by then with an air of beneficent sufferance that turned each hour tense with the sense of the clock running down. Which, ugh. _Not_ the best comparison right now. But that’s what Eliot and Margo return to him in these moments: a mutual submission to a fiction that grants Quentin the joy of giving himself over to fantasy once more without shame.

Despite Margo’s hand holding his head in place, his eyes traitorously slip sideways, to try to catch sight of Eliot in his peripheral vision. He can’t help it, a hunger to look and look at Eliot that has never yet been sated. Margo _tsks_ softly and Quentin guiltily averts his gaze, locks eyes with her. 

Margo’s lips curl into her full, glorious smile. “I know, honey,” she says with an exaggerated sweetness that makes Quentin’s skin prickle. “He’s gorgeous, isn’t he? Of course you can’t look at anything else. You have to earn it, though.”

Quentin nods, breath coming faster. He lets himself fall into this, sheer horniness overcoming any lingering embarrassment or awkwardness. It’s painful to imagine himself in his first year. He doesn’t have much patience or kindness for that kid, and when he does manage some compassion for his 22-year-old self thanks to hours and hours of therapy, a piercing sadness for all that’s to come overwhelms him. Not in all the ways you’d expect, either. Yes, Quentin feels _so sad_ for all the hell that’s coming for that twerp who has no fucking idea how bad life can really be. But he also feels a devastating ache for how his past self really had no goddamn clue just how _good_ it could be. How much better it was going to be. He has _no idea_ what’s in store for him. That’s so fucking sad to Quentin, that self that couldn’t possibly imagine this, imagine _Eliot—_ not like this, not what they have now. Quentin can’t go back in time to let himself know he’s just gotta stick it out, and even if he could violate space-time he thinks his present happiness would make all he would say to his past self as incomprehensible as a foreign language. Anyway. The unbearable melancholy and joy of all that really gets in the way of any erotic reveries about how sexually overcome Quentin had been, without even being fully aware of it, by the glamorous upperclassman that miraculously seemed to enjoy having Quentin around.

But this fantasy Margo has set up. Quentin imagines it, a Fillorian servant catching glimpses of his king as he goes about his duties. His king is so beautiful, so confident in his own skin, he moves with such effortless grace and power. Serving-Boy-Quentin can’t stop looking at him, safe in the knowledge that the king will never look back—but then one day he does, and Quentin feels a warm confusion he can’t quite name. Maybe the week after that the king passes him in the hall and he stops Quentin with a touch on the arm, makes Quentin look up from where he’s shyly contemplating his feet. He asks Quentin personal questions while Quentin, flustered, stammers out answers. Where are you from? What does your family do? What brought you here? Quentin keeps darting looks upwards at the king—god, he’s so fucking _tall—_ to catch an amused smirk, a hot appraising look in the king’s lovely eyes. When the king finally releases him, Serving-Boy-Quentin rushes off with relief, but has to go about his duties thinking about it, about the king's eyes on him, about the genuine kindness in his inquiries. That night he thinks about it some more, once he’s in the servant’s dormitory. While his fellows slumber around him, he holds his breath and listens guilty to any signs of stirring as he slides his hand into his dumb Fillorian pajamas and touches his dick while thinking of his king upstairs in his big lonely bed.

(That’s, um, significant poetic license? Whitespire’s staff mostly live in the surrounding villages and commute in via portals Alice was contracted to help set up, and the ones that live in the castle itself all have their own rooms, so, uh, this particular aspect of the fantasy is probably, like, problematic? Actually no, the whole fantasy is deeply problematic, like—)

Quentin is pulled from this spiral by Margo stepping right up in his personal space, close enough that her breasts brush his chest. He blinks down at her. 

“First step to earning it is not to be a total space cadet,” Margo says. The words move her ribcage and make him even more aware of her breasts which are—very nice. 

“Sorry, yeah. I can—let me—I’m good,” Quentin says, desperate. “My mouth, I—” 

Because, hey, this is about what Quentin wants too, and what he wants is to please get his mouth on somebody. Quentin and Serving-Boy-Quentin blur and morph, as he imagines his plucky Fillorian counterpart, roaming Whitespire in search of dicks to suck, head filled with images of his beautiful monarch and although he barely even allows himself to think the thought, that he could be permitted that liberty, still, if—he’ll be ready. He’ll have something to give. 

“Not just _good_ ,” Margo scoffs. “Anyone can suck a dick. Like I said, the king only takes the best. The crème de la crème” _—_ here Margo pauses dramatically, lips twitching in her signature ‘ _I think I’m fucking delightful’_ spasm _—_ “...of cocksluts.”

“Margo, oh my _god_ ,” Quentin says on a sputtering giggle as Margo laughs. Because, well, she is delightful. Of all the people on all the planets that know of Margo Hanson he’s probably #2 on the list of people who find her most delightful, Eliot and Margo herself being tied for first place. 

He nearly takes the opening this moment of hilarity provides to look over at Eliot like he so badly wants to, but something stops him. The idea he can’t look at Eliot but Eliot can look at him has him _so hot_. 

This is another thing about sex with Eliot and Margo: they laugh so much, but the tone can go from high goofiness to high seriousness and back again with an ease that Quentin is happy to give himself over to, as he does now when Margo schools her face back into that cooly assured, judgmental smirk. 

(Dropping back into the fantasy, seamless, like a smooth stone slipping beneath still waters. Maybe a couple of weeks after their little hallway chat, one evening the king, looking burdened and glum, sits alone after dinner at his banquet table, downing glass after glass of wine, turning away all offers of company from his courtiers, and shockingly even rebuffing Lady Margo’s offer of companionship with a grunt. As the night wears on the servers must try to muffle their yawns and attempt to not be too obvious about leaning against the wall, as they stand at the sides of the great room waiting to be of service, unable to be dismissed and to retire to their rest until the king decides to go to his own. His bleary eye roams over their liveried, wilting ranks and alights on Quentin, and with an imperious crook of his finger he indicates that Quentin should come to him. Quentin does, with legs shaking from exhaustion and nervous excitement, accompanied by the sounds of a muffled flutter of awakened interest in his colleagues at this heretofore unheard of occurrence. Everyone knows of the king’s boys, of course—even Quentin, the newest of their number, and he’s certainly tuned into the gossip more these last weeks. He’s shameless, and at any one of his debauched banquets you might witness the king showering his favorites with kisses, pulling them into lap, ordering them to dance for the lustful eyes of a visiting dignitary. He certainly makes no secret of _services rendered_ when he dismisses them from his bed—they do quite well for themselves, sent to the provinces with a respectable position and a comfortable salary, invariably accompanied by a pretty well-born wife. But _this_? To invite a servant to sit by his side of an evening, to pour wine into his own glass and then put it to this nobody’s lip, to sit and talk and talk in whispers the ears of their avid audience can’t quite catch until even the king has to take pity on them and dismisses them, and they are relieved but still with a mix of jealousy and scorn cast glances over their shoulders as they leave into the vast dimness of the hall at the two figures, heads close in the glow of one brave guttering candle.)

“Good with your mouth, huh? I’ll be the judge of that.”

Quentin feels a surge of resentment. Margo knows he’s fucking good, Quentin thinks, as he remembers with a visceral pang the smell and taste and feel of Margo coming against his face three times in an hour, last week. He owes all that skill to Margo, which she wouldn’t hesitate to remind him of—she’s the one who had the patience and confidence and humor and bossiness to teach him, unlike poor Alice. What a wonderful and absurd pass his life has come to, that his most enduring shame with regards to Alice Quinn was that he hadn’t been very good at giving head. 

“I think you’re lacking some necessary equipment to make a fair judgement,” Quentin mutters, turned rebellious.

“Ooh, he’s _mouthy_ ,” Margo says, stepping back just a little and turning her head to look at Eliot with an accompanying dramatic flip of hair. “I don’t know about that.”

Quentin behaves, while a moment of silence stretches, indicating some non-verbal conversation is taking place between them. He wants to look at Eliot so badly but he knows if he can just be good, it’ll be worth it—whatever _it_ turns out to be. 

He takes the reprieve this provides and thinks of Serving-Boy-Quentin enthusiastically but mediocrely eating some poor milkmaid’s pussy in some wooded glen or something, god, no, that’s terrible—

“Well, I tried,” Margo says. “Lucky for you, he likes them mouthy.”

—thankfully he’s escaped that life to the wonders of uh, menial labor, and pursuing his true life’s ambition to be the créme de la créme of Castle Whitespire’s cocksluts, and my my, look at him now. 

Quentin is condemned not to look at Eliot but he can’t stand not to have physical contact; he risks the impertinence of allowing himself to touch her hip. She’s so warm, through the gauzy material of her gown. 

He’s nervous, though. He’s sucked the cocks of his fellow serving boys and stable boys and the butler and ~~the chef~~ (ugh, no— _Josh_ ) and the chamberlain. Serving-Boy-Quentin’s Castle Whitespire doesn’t have much in the way of gender parity in employment, apparently.

Except, of course for the king’s right hand, a beautiful and intimidating woman, totally trusted, utterly depended on, always by his side. Quentin doesn’t dare look her in the eye, though. Everyone lives in awe of her, and the speculations—what’s their _deal_ , anyway? Do you think they... _you know?_ —are only ventured in whispers. He couldn’t have anticipated having to please her first.

Quentin’s fingers have slid under the hem of Margo’s robe, and are fascinated with the satiny skin of her thigh. In his mind, she’s still the untouchable creature who truly holds his fate in her hands. 

“I can, whatever you want, please—” Neither Quentin knows quite what he’s asking, just that he be given a chance, that he’ll do anything, anything, to get even just a _look_ at the man sitting in the chair.

Margo takes two huge steps back. Quentin gives a full-body shiver both from the removal of her warmth and the force of his hunger.

“Hm. No, I don’t think your mouth is what he wants to use right now.” Another shiver rocks through Quentin, at the thought of being _made use of_. It’s not quite in step with the usual tenor of Quentin’s sexual longings—it’s like their starker, less tender cousin, and one that makes him shudder with want.

Margo smiles at him, quirks her eyebrows in familiar enquiry, and Quentin says, “God, yes, please, anything—” happy to be reduced to trembling animal desire.

“Take off your clothes,” she commands.

Quentin does, pulling his t-shirt off over his head, sliding his sweatpants off his hips until he stands nude before them. A flush creeps up his chest, and he has to resist the urge to cover himself with his hands. He ends up splitting the difference and crossing his arms over his chest. Half the time—and this in fact far predates, you know, dematerializing in the Mirror Realm and then having his soul shoved into a body of living clay his friends had made, he thinks actually this feeling of disbelief and discomfort and disgust can really be dated to around the time he entered kindergarten, probably—he can’t believe he has a body, can’t _stand_ that he has a body with its never-ending demands, can’t believe that he’s been fucking cursed with a corporeal form that works in fiendish partnership with his brain to devise any endless number of torments—and he’s equally disbelieving and awed and grateful that he has a body that can feel pleasure and give pleasure, that he has occasionally been capable of joy so great that he feels it singing in every nerve-ending.

It’s agony, to stand there bared to their appraisal, their judgement. It’s awful, and he’s filled with unbearable love for it, this unruly body that exists for their eyes to weigh, to be reduced for a second or for a night to just a body and if that body passes muster then wonderful things are going to happen to it. 

Margo steps forward and runs her hands over his shoulders and down his arms. “Hairy, he likes that,” and then cups his half-hard dick in her hand. Rubs at the head with her thumb. Quentin’s cock twitches pitifully, and Margo teases him until precome is leaking from the slit, until there’s enough that she can spread it down his shaft and give his cock a businesslike pump. He doesn’t know why it’s doing it for him, the idea of Eliot’s eyes on them, as Margo, other hand on her hip and eyes cold and calculating like she’s fucking examining a horse at auction, gives him a handjob. But it is, he’s squirming with flustered arousal and his dick is hard enough to slap against his belly when Margo moves her hands to cup his balls, roll them against her palm. 

Eliot’s eyes on them—the king’s eyes on them. They coexist in his mind, split-screened. Eliot’s warm eyes on his body, his wandering, lazy, exhaustive, avid gaze slowly cataloguing Quentin’s every inch, his...Quentin’s imagination fails to provide more detail here, because most of the time Quentin still can’t quite fathom any part of him providing much aesthetic pleasure but he can anchor himself in those precious seconds where he _just_ knows in his bones that he is seen and found pleasing, which he knows by Eliot’s hot gaze, his panting breath, the bruises he leaves at Quentin’s hips, the way his voice cracks when he gasps ridiculous dear things like _oh my gorgeous baby_ into Quentin’s ear, when all these things cohere to fill Quentin to the brim with the knowledge of Eliot’s desire for him. Then, another gaze: chill, assessing, unmoved, in control—the king has seen this all a hundred times before. This is a regular Tuesday. He’s had a dozen boys, and despite his loyal right hand’s dedicated screening process, none has been impressive enough to last. But Quentin—if he’s just given a chance, he knows he can be different. 

“Have you?”

Quentin blinks feverish eyes at Margo, confused by this question. 

“Have—have I what?” 

“Gone to Coachella. No, _had sex,_ obviously.”

Oh, that’s what they’re doing. There’s an amusement in Margo’s eyes that’s confirmation she knows exactly what she’s doing here.

“It depends on your, um, definition.” Quentin, licking into his sweetheart’s cunt imagining what it would be like to be inside that slick tight heat. Sucking a man’s cock in a darkened hallway, feeling the fullness, the stretch, imagining what it would feel like inside him. Which Quentin, he or his fantasy-self, is a useless distinction to make on this point.

“Good with your mouth, right. Ever been fucked?”

Quentin feels a odd surge of power as he shakes his head, because he knows the reaction that Eliot will have to that, even if he can’t see it. His face feels warm and his breathing picks up, because although Eliot’s virginity thing doesn’t do it for him to the same degree it does make him recall how once it had been literally true. In a lost life lived by firelight, Quentin had once stuttered out: _um, I’ve blown guys but I haven’t, uh you know, but I—I really, really want to_. It conjures up hazy memories of Eliot leading him by the hand to the hushed dark of their cottage and with great patience and fathoms of tenderness teaching Quentin’s body how to take Eliot’s body inside itself. It’s not like he wants it always, not that he isn’t happy to move past that first tremulous pleasure-pain into all the infinite ways of being together that come after. Tonight, for example. Or the memorable night several months ago where after Eliot had fucked him Quentin was open and blissed out enough that Margo had been able to fit her whole—well. Anyway, still. It’s super cheesy and like, _heteronormative_ , probably—but it’s a moment that is ever present within him, that reverberates through every moment of his life, that remembered gasp of _oh, oh, Eliot_ , eyes wet, mouth open, and then all speech fleeing as it came over him in a wave what a body could do, what his body could do and what it was _for_ , this was what it was for, and it was Eliot who had shown him. 

“No,” Quentin whispers. “I’ve never.” 

“Oh, he loves that.” Margo tweaks his nipples, pats him on the thigh, and says, “Let’s take you for a spin. Get on the bed. Hands and knees.” 

Quentin obeys. Gets himself settled, still painfully hard. Eliot can see— _obviously_ he’s seen it all before, but there’s something about the vantage point and the fact that Quentin still hasn’t looked at him. He can see it—all, Quentin thinks, taking a shaky breath as Margo runs a hand down his back, cups his ass, scratches a bit with her nails in a way that makes him emit a little whine, then soothing it with the flat of her palm, and then she spreads him wide and just—looks. Quentin writhes, muffles a moan into the pillow he’s hauled towards him as an anchor. Eliot’s, marked out by the comforting sharp rich scent of his shampoo. 

Margo thumbs his hole and he feels it twitch. “ _Cute_ ,” she coos, and he can actually feel the heat radiating from his neck and chest. The familiar longed for embarrassment of being on display this way hits his brain slightly differently when it’s a beautiful girl doing it. 

“Let’s see if he’s telling the truth about his untouched little hole,” Margo says, which is, _god_ , fucking cringeworthy, a deeply mortifying thing to say and to hear but Margo says it with supreme, unshakeable confidence, and it’s like, it’s _gross_ , that’s not how it works and Margo herself has railed in his hearing about how virginity is a social construct—and none of it fucking matters as the words make him gasp and his hands clench in the sheets and he finds himself grinding his hips down as he tries to hump the bed. 

Then Margo leans over and _spits on him_ , utilitarian, economical, and breaches Quentin with the tip of one finger while Quentin’s vision whites out a bit and he doesn’t come, obviously, but it sort of spiritually feels like he does? The fading echo of his moan that he catches when he tunes back in is humiliatingly loud, and he absolutely doesn’t give a shit: another thing they’ve taught him—Margo with fierce protectiveness, Eliot with nurturing tenderness—there can be no shame here, there’s nothing too weird or silly or absurd as long as it’s making you feel good.

Margo’s finger is wet with actual lube as she pushes it fully into him. “Fuck, he’s _tight_ ,” she says in a bored, observatory tone. An admiring, professional approval, as she tucks two fingers into Quentin’s ass and says, “but he takes it well, he’s _gagging_ for it,” a confiding concern as she leans forward, and says “good, his cock is huge,” and finally a condescending magnanimity as she fucks three fingers into his body and says, “you’ve been good, sweetie, you can play with yourself if you want.”

Quentin’s cock is achingly hard between his legs but he doesn’t want to, shakes his head slowly as he drives himself back on Margo’s hand moving in him, letting his pleasure narrow to that point, pulse hot and deep inside him, imagining—fuck, fuck, the king’s eyes on them, watching him moan and convulse around Margo’s hand in him. As she slips her pinky inside him Quentin thinks frantically, _you can go here, this is for you, everything is for you_. He’ll take the king’s big lovely cock inside his body, keep it snug and warm, he can do that, he can make room. 

His thighs are trembling, he’s moaning into Eliot’s pillow, the scent sending spikes of arousal through him until Margo gives him a hard smack on the ass that makes him give his moans to the air, to them again, as she says, “None of that now, he likes to hear you.”

The king can hear him, the king can have anything he wants, Quentin will be so good if he can just look at him. Quentin wants to serve him, in all ways. The king is probably—lonely, so lonely, in his duties. He has a loyal friend in Margo, of course, but still—so lonely, as he goes through pretty striving boys who look right through him at the bright futures and dutiful brides his bed can buy them, and the king senses it, fools himself as long as he can with the illusion that it’s he that they want—but not Quentin, Quentin will stay, as long as the king will have him and past that. The king will try to send him away, probably, but Quentin will _stay_. He’ll skulk around the castle after his employment is abruptly terminated. He’ll bang on the doors, harass the guards, call out the king’s secret name as he stands under his windows, that’s what Quentin is thinking as Margo removes her hand and flips him over, as he lies gasping on his back having to screw up his eyes to avoid violating the prohibition against looking at the king, because he wants him he wants him he wants him.

“Please,” he begs, voice shot. “Please can I just _look_ at him.” 

It’s been a constant internal refrain since Margo said he had to earn the right, but Quentin realizes he hasn’t said it aloud until he hears Eliot’s gasp which—does not help his fortitude. 

Margo kneels over him. She ghosts feather-light fingers over his untouched cock and he actually maybe yells, just a little. (Another reason Margo gave for her choice of a tower room: you motherfuckers are _loud_ , I can’t have you disturbing people. There were wards, but she thought this was very funny.)

“Get me off, but don’t come, and then we’ll see,” and Quentin’s mouth is opening to ask what she means, what does he need to do, as she moves to straddle his thighs and takes his cock in hand and slides down onto it. 

Quentin closes his eyes again, breathes deeply as the wet heat of Margo’s wonderful cunt envelops him. _God_. Opens his eyes to her satisfied smile and hot dark glance, to the flexing of the muscles in her thighs as she lifts herself up and then slides back down with a little sigh. He puts his hand on her trembling belly, above the radiating heat between her thighs, slides his hand up to rest flat and broad between her breasts. 

She rides him, lazy, contemplative. “He’s average,” she says speculatively, as she lifts her hands above her head to gather her gorgeous masses of hair in her fist, lift it off her neck, “but that’s not what you’re for, anyway.” 

Sweat beads on her collarbones, as she gives indulgent rolls of her hips. Quentin wants to slide his hand back down, rub his thumb between her folds, but for the moment he can only blink up at her wetly, a bit stunned. He thrusts up a little and she clicks her tongue at him and stretches over him to pin his arms to the bed above his head. “None of that, now,” she says mildly, “hold the headboard if you can’t behave.”

Margo just uses his body, gyrates on top of him, and touches herself to draw soft little gasps from her own lips. He wants so badly to help, to put his hand between her legs near where his cock enters her and rub tight circles in the slick heat there and be the one responsible for those whimpers, for the rippling of her thigh muscles, for the way she’s clenching tight around him and coming with a burst of wetness that he can feel, that he wants to taste—not least because the distraction would help him as he tries desperately not to come, he can’t come, even though some mammal part of his brain is screaming at him to bury himself as deep as he can in that warmth and find release. 

“Oh, good boy,” Margo says, after a sigh. That also poses a challenge to Quentin’s willpower. She looks over her shoulder at Eliot, and he can catch the far sharp edge of her grin.

“I didn’t—I didn’t come, can I—”

Margo lifts herself off of him, moves beside him. “Yeah, even I’m not that cruel. Look at him, baby.”

Quentin sits up with a speed that makes Margo laugh, delighted. He doesn’t know what he expected to see. Maybe the princeling unmoved, cold in his finery. 

What he gets is—Eliot, his absurd Fillorian pants undone, gorgeous cock in gorgeous hand, the swollen flushed head popping up between his circled thumb and forefinger as he frantically moves his hand on himself. Whatever distance he may have maintained is long gone. His eyes are searing when Quentin meets them—meet Eliot where Eliot has been looking at him all this time—Eliot _sobs_.

“ _Oh my god can I please suck it_ ,” Quentin gasps.

Margo, with a gracious wave of her hand, assents. “Please, he’s going to chafe, he’s been going at it for so long,” and Quentin scrambles off the bed and faceplants right onto Eliot’s dick. 

God, _fuck_. This is what he wants, this is what he always wants, what he _needs_. Eliot, all around him, filling his every sense. The sharp-salt-musk scent of him, the mouthwatering wetness at the fat head of his cock, the way Eliot drops his head back and gives a gasping, hot laugh as Quentin licks at it, the way Quentin can feel the tremor in his stomach when he rests his hand there and licks at the vein on the underside. The way Eliot’s hand clenches in Quentin’s hair as he bobs his head, takes as much of him as he can—still not all, and that expanse at the base he has to cover with his hand is one of the more erotic constants in Quentin’s life—slobbering around the shaft, saliva everywhere, swallowing and swallowing around the head as Eliot tugs at his hair and laughs and laughs, he laughs so much, and Quentin will never, ever get tired of it, says, “fuck, gorgeous, you feel so good, you were _so hot_ , you have no idea, baby.” 

Suddenly Margo’s hand is in Quentin’s hair, pulling him with surprising gentleness off Eliot’s cock. Quentin closes his eyes, blissed out, and feels a string of saliva stretch from Eliot’s cock to Quentin’s swollen mouth and then snap, as Eliot laughs out, “Jesus _fucking_ Christ.”

“What’s the verdict? Good?”

“So good.” Eliot’s thumb, still wet with his own precome, pushing at Quentin’s bottom lip. Quentin suckles at it, moaning. “So good, baby.”

Margo gives an exaggerated sigh. “See? No standards. Okay, get that cock nice and wet so it can go inside you.”

So he does, until Eliot says, “I’m gonna come, honey.” (The fantasy has broken, for Eliot, for some reason. It’s not something he usually has a problem maintaining. Eliot’s reserves of fantasy are vast and strange. He’ll start with a _so, I’m a tortured and very sexy vampire, and you are an upright Victorian gentleman, and I don’t want to turn you and destroy your immortal soul, and I bravely resist feeding from you but finally I have to give in_ and an _Eliot, WHAT, wow, OK,_ will not deter him and that’s the story of how four hours later Quentin’s neck was so black-and-blue that he got the unexpected gift of having to cancel lunch with his mother.)

Then, then. Quentin on his back on the bed. ( _Missionary? Really? Even for this?_ ) Eliot above him. Quentin touching his throat, his hair, his eyebrows. God, his eyes, as he presses into Quentin, that stretch, that fullness, everything he ever imagined. Quentin takes him in, breathing through it. Eliot touches his hair, so gently. Quentin is here now. The king will never be lonely again. Quentin will stay. Or they’ll leave, together. Quentin will make a home of his body, and his heart. He’ll convince the king to give it all up, renounce his crown and castle and kingdom, turn his back on power and shame. They’ll head to the country, Quentin the serving boy no longer a serving boy and the king no longer a king. He’ll teach the king how to farm. They’ll get chickens, a cow. They’ll make babies. 

(That last one—speaking of fantasies.)

“So? Gonna keep this one?” Margo beside them. Close enough to touch. Quentin turns his head on Eliot’s pillow to Margo’s on his, fumbles his hand out to tangle with hers. Her head propped on her bent arm, eyes shining and mouth soft and generous with its contentment. 

“Forever. Perfect,” Eliot gasps, “he’s so perfect.”

*

They lie tangled together in sticky silent fulfillment for a while, after.

“So, you think I should wear the clothes more often, even if I’m not a king?”

Quentin doesn’t know what he’s talking about for a moment. Oh, right. He does like the clothes. That’s what started this whole thing.

“If you want,” Quentin replies. Looking at Eliot. Rubbing his knuckle across Eliot’s cheek. “It’s a good look.”

“Everything’s a good look with me, dearest,” Eliot says with a dramatic sigh, before a pleased smile breaks across his face. “No, I did kind of miss it. Maybe you’re onto something.”

But Quentin can feel his brow scrunch in confusion. “Wait, the crown’s still in place. How?”

Margo pops up from where she’d been lazily masturbating herself to another orgasm while Eliot and Quentin gazed at each other. “Spell. My invention.” 

“...oh.”

“Hey, don’t judge,” Margo says, getting off the bed and gathering up her discarded clothes.

“You’re leaving?” Eliot asks.

“Yeah, this was just what I needed. Bossing your boyfriend around is a great stress reliever, I’ve got a date with my Hitachi and an Ambien and then I’m going to pass out for ten hours and sleep like a fucking baby before having to deal with our current political clusterfuck tomorrow. Thanks, boys. Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Margo says as she scoops up her shoes. “Mama needs a good night’s rest, and we’re not all fucking otters who need to hold hands to sleep. The cuddling would get in my way.”

“This otter factoid is an interesting revelation of what group chat content you choose to engage with,” Eliot says mildly. Margo rolls her eyes, gives him a smacking kiss on the forehead, grabs her crown off his head, and blows out of the room. “Night, Bambi,” he calls after her as the door slams behind her.

Then he turns to Quentin, his smile, impossibly, softening. He traces Quentin’s brow with his thumb. “Good night?” he says, sounding sleepy and satiated. 

“Yeah, very good.” Quentin feels something planet-vast, in his chest. Almost painful. He feels it all the time, and hasn’t ever quite succeeded in expressing the enormity of it in words. How lucky he is that he gets to have Eliot. To love Eliot and make him laugh and make him happy and make him angry and make him come and comfort him when he’s scared and lonely and frustrated, and for Eliot to return it all and more besides. _I love you_ might get at it. He hopes so. He says it all the time, just in case.

But, now, into the space between them. “Today was. It was a perfect day.”

Quentin says this with a tone of voice he’s always hated, one of overwhelm in the face of the eternal inadequacy of language. Eliot looks confused, for a moment, probably because of how ordinary the day was. Nothing about it was special at all.

 _But that’s just the thing, isn’t it_ , Eliot’s adoring eyes seem to say to him, as the confusion clears, and he smiles, and kisses Quentin, and agrees: yes, yes, it was wonderful.

**Author's Note:**

> [knifetop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knifetop/pseuds/knifetop): Quentin if you would just shut up this fantasy would end in a labor strike
> 
> #teamwombat
> 
> I am on tumblr [here](https://honeybabydichotomy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
